Cloud Connect and VAC Portal Maintenance Modes

Lately i’ve been digging deeper into the Veeam Availability Console and have been wrapping my head around it’s extended feature set. With that I thought it would be good to start a series of short blog posts pointing out examples of how certain parts are configured and what is happening under the covers. To kick things off I am going to talk about Maintenance Modes in VAC and also how it translates back to Cloud Connect Maintenance mode and also start off by covering that new Update 3 feature.

In Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3 we introduced a Maintenance Mode feature for Cloud Connect. In a nutshell this makes the Service Provider cloud resources unavailable for tenants to perform backup or backup copy job operations. This is true for jobs running on Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3, Agent for Windows 2.1 and Agent for Linux 2.0.

To enable Maintenance Mode from the VBR console Right Click on the Cloud Connect top level tree item and click on Maintenance Mode

Read the message and click Yes

Once completed you should see the following status in the Cloud Connect menu tree

You can also set and check this state in PowerShell

PowerShell

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PSC:\Users\veeam>Get-VBRCommand-Name*CloudMaintenanceMode*

CommandType Name Version Source

----------------------------

Cmdlet Disable-VBRCloudMaintenanceMode9.5.0.0VeeamPSSnapIn

Cmdlet Enable-VBRCloudMaintenanceMode9.5.0.0VeeamPSSnapIn

PSC:\Users\veeam>Enable-VBRCloudMaintenanceMode-Verbose

VERBOSE:Entering maintenance mode

PSC:\Users\veeam>Get-VBRCloudInfrastructureState

Maintenance

PSC:\Users\veeam>Disable-VBRCloudMaintenanceMode-Verbose

VERBOSE:Exiting maintenance mode

PSC:\Users\veeam>Get-VBRCloudInfrastructureState

Active

Once triggered, any running jobs are gracefully stopped. Within that the current task is allowed to complete but all subsequent jobs will fail. In the case of an agent the whole job is allowed to complete. Any new backup or backup copy job that tries to start after Maintenance Mode has been initialed will fail with an error which is shown below.

Tying this into the Veeam Availability Console you can also trigger Maintenance Mode from the VAC UI. To enable maintenance mode for Veeam Cloud Connect, log in to Veeam Availability Console as a Portal Administrator and at the top right corner click Configuration and under Portal Configuration click Cloud Connect Server and click Enable Maintenance Mode.

Click Yes to confirm the operation.

The message isn’t 100% correct based on what I talked about earlier. The current job task will be completed and not dropped as suggested here.

You can disable Maintenance Mode by clicking on the menu option if it’s enabled.

Maintenance Mode for Veeam Availability Portal UI

For those times when you may need to perform configuration changes or OS updates to the system hosting the VAC Portal you have the ability to put the portal its self into maintenance mode. When enabled, all users will not be able to login to the portal remotely and you will see a message on the welcome page as shown below.

To toggle this setting go to the top right of the VAC console and click Configuration and then under Server Settings click on Settings and go to the Maintenance Mode Tab. Set the toggle to on or off to enable or disable and click save.

Once in Maintenance Mode you can only log back into the portal from the local console of the server hosting the VAC UI role. Note that while under Maintenance Mode you can only modify the SQL Server Configuration or toggle Maintenance Mode off.

Conclusion:

I’ve gone through the Maintenance Mode options for both Veeam Availability Console and Cloud Connect and how each one is enabled and what their purpose is. For the moment, in Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3 the Maintenance Mode is limited to Backup and Backup copy job operations. There are a other operations that are not currently impacted by this mode such as vCloud Director backups or Cloud Connect Replication operations however this will be looked at in upcoming releases.

To read more about Maintenance Mode head to the Veeam Help Documentation page here.